Angela Carella: Winding story of Stamford kid makes good

Updated 9:51 pm, Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Headlines are being written again about the interesting life of Bobby Valentine.

Fired in October as manager of the Boston Red Sox, Valentine, who once managed the New York Mets and the Texas Rangers, will be athletic director of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, it was announced Tuesday. He's moving from the big leagues to a small college, even though he's never been an academic administrator.

So, at 62, Valentine has done the unexpected, as he always does.

He has been called a natural leader. A talent. An arrogant hothead. A good teacher. Overly competitive. A baseball savant with an absolute grasp of the game. Egotistical. A good guy. Confident. Vindictive. Driven. Dedicated. Generous. Loyal.

Valentine likely has been all of that as he has crossed all the bases he has crossed. But for him, home plate is always Stamford.

The city has known his name since he was a student at then-Rippowam High School, where, as a sophomore, he led the Warriors football team to a state championship. He was all-state in football three times. He was all-state in baseball three times, finishing high school with a .402 batting average. He won state track championships in the 60-yard dash and 330-yard run.

By the spring of 1968 Valentine had 250 offers of college football scholarships. He chose the University of Southern California. "I looked forward to being a football hero. I looked forward to four years of college life," a young Valentine told The Advocate.

But Major League Baseball came calling. All 20 teams at the time were interested in him. On June 6, 1968, shortly after his 18th birthday, he was the fifth player drafted in the country. Valentine hoped for an invitation from the Mets, but they went with Tim Foli. The Los Angeles Dodgers made Valentine their No. 1 pick.

"Well, if the Dodgers thought that much of my potential, then I was forced to re-evaluate the situation," Valentine told The Advocate at the time.

A couple of weeks later he graduated high school and, the next day, he was in Ogden, Utah, playing with the Dodgers' minor league team.

In March 1970, Valentine was sent to St. Petersburg, Fla., to play with the Dodgers in an exhibition game against the Mets. A bunch of Stamford residents went to Florida to watch, and Valentine didn't let them down. He handled 14 plays at shortstop, including nine assists and five outs, and took part in three double plays. In one play, he raced more than 100 feet from shortstop position down the left-field line to catch a fly ball. And he got two hits off Mets pitcher Jerry Koosman, then the World Series champions, to help the Dodgers beat the Mets 1-0 in a 16-inning game.

After the game the 19-year-old Valentine told a Los Angeles Times reporter, "When I don't have fun, I consider it to be a lousy day. Maybe it's corny, but when I put on the uniform, something starts to beat inside of me. It's great to be alive."

Dodgers Manager Walter Alston told the L.A. Times Valentine was an innate leader, and Valentine said he saw himself as leading a team one day.

Three years later, in 1973, when he was batting better than .300 in what many said was shaping up to be an All-Star season, Valentine jumped the fence while chasing a home-run ball at Anaheim Stadium. His spikes got caught in the chain links. The Bleacher Report calls it one of the 40 worst injuries in Major League Baseball history.

The multiple compound fracture to Valentine's leg cost him that season and slowed him down forever. He got his wish to play for the Mets, joining the team for the 1977 and 1978 seasons, but he retired in 1979, when he was 29.

A year later he opened Bobby Valentine's Sports Gallery Cafe in Stamford. The city, surrounded by the Gold Coast towns of Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan, was struggling to emerge from its manufacturing past. Downtown buildings were run down and drunks lived in Columbus Park. It was a good place to get mugged.

Valentine put his restaurant right there. He had to shoo prostitutes away from the front door. But the place had Valentine's name on it and people, particularly Stamford people, came. It was an instant landmark.

Valentine was a hands-on restaurant manager, but did not give up baseball. He worked as third-base coach for the Mets from 1983 to 1985. In 1986, he was hired as manager of the Texas Rangers. He was named American League Manager of the Year for turning around a perennial last-place franchise. But he developed a reputation as headstrong and egotistical, even dubbing himself "the most hated man in baseball." In 1992 he was fired by one of the owners, George W. Bush, future president of the United States.

Valentine kept pushing. He became a manager in the minor leagues, riding buses to games. He became a scout. He became the first Big League skipper to manage a team in Japan.

In 1996 he got the job of managing the floundering Mets. He took them to the playoffs in 1999 and the World Series in 2000, where they lost to the Yankees. He was fired in 2002.

He became a baseball analyst on television. He returned to Japan, where he was treated like a rock star for turning the Chibe Lotte Marines into champions. He left in 2009.

He returned to ESPN as a commentator. At the request of his old friend, Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia, Valentine in 2011 served as the city's director of Public Safety, Health and Welfare. He took a small salary that he donated to charity.

Later that year he took the job as manager of the dysfunctional Red Sox. After a disastrous single season in Boston, Valentine was out.

Soon he will begin at Sacred Heart University.

Along his many divergent paths Valentine has taken old friends from Stamford. At the height of his exciting days as Mets skipper, for example, Valentine often had in his office the late Mickey Lione. Lione was a championship-winning high school and Babe Ruth League coach in Stamford for 34 years. Valentine revered Lione for his intelligence and insight, calling him "the coach of coaches."

Valentine tried to explain to Mets General Manager Steve Phillips and some of the players why he discussed their games with Lione. At first they didn't understand, Valentine told The Advocate in 1999, "but soon they came to grips with it. He just had a presence. A special gift. They noticed it."